Understanding oneself through another’s life

Understanding oneself through another’s life is a recurring concept in the novel: when direct self-examination becomes unbearable, another person’s story can serve as a conduit to one’s own feelings. The idea connects Kido’s inquiry into Makoto Hara with the literature through which Rié gradually learns to approach Yuto. It also carries a limit. Identification may make another life emotionally inhabitable, but it does not make the two lives identical or undo the losses that separate them.

Indirect Access to the Self

Kido describes this process to Kaori while trying to explain why he investigates another person’s history. Practical problems in his own life provoke nausea and an excruciating sense that his existence is radically insecure. Thinking about the person he has been investigating instead gives him relief from that bodily rejection: through someone else’s life, he can return indirectly to questions he cannot confront head-on. He compares the process to reading a novel and says that people seek another person as a conduit for emotion because no one can deal with suffering alone.

The explanation is not a claim that Kido has mastered his own difficulties. He says he does not fully understand the process himself, and his confession ends by acknowledging that he may seem gloomy and difficult to be around. The indirect route is therefore both practical and incomplete: it lets him make contact with his life, but it does not dissolve the insecurity that made direct contact intolerable. The language of reading describes not escape from suffering but a mediated way of approaching it.

Hara’s Borrowed Story

Kaori asks why Makoto Hara, having wanted to shed his family register, did not simply invent a life story of his own. Why, instead, did he assume Daisuké Taniguchi’s identity and act out the story of Daisuké’s liver-transplant crisis? Kido answers cautiously. He suspects that Hara empathized with Daisuké, much as readers or film viewers enter the experiences of others, and suggests that some people can project their emotions into a story they find compelling. He describes finding oneself within another person’s trauma as a way of soothing a particular kind of loneliness.

Kido also recognizes the limits of his explanation: he is interpolating his own fascination with Hara into his account of Hara’s motives. That qualification matters. The novel offers the idea of identification as an interpretation, not as a settled diagnosis. Hara’s choice to inhabit Daisuké’s history may have enabled him to feel and act through a life other than the one attached to his own name, but Kido cannot claim transparent access to the dead man’s inner purpose.

In his later reading of the Narcissus myth, Kido sharpens the connection between borrowed identity and the desire to escape the self. Narcissus wishes to depart from his own body when he recognizes his reflection; Hara, too, had wanted to leave his body, though in a different sense. Kido distinguishes the aims: Narcissus might have learned to love himself, whereas Hara wanted to become someone else, love another, and be loved. Yet Kido considers whether Hara’s transformation also concealed a more fundamental hope—to love not merely the proper name Makoto Hara, but the person who should have been. The myth does not settle that possibility; it gives Kido another story through which to think about Hara and himself.

Rié Learns to Read Yuto

The same pattern appears in Rié’s attempt to understand her son. She is not a confident reader, and Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s “Asakusa Park,” which Yuto had mentioned to her at Burial Mound Park, initially leaves her puzzled. Its surreal images include a sign that becomes a sandwich man and a cylindrical postbox that turns transparent. More than those transformations, however, the story’s separation between a boy and his father catches her attention: the boy loses his father in Asakusa, mistakes a masked stranger for him, and eventually cries beside a large stone lantern.

Rié cannot work out the story’s overall meaning, but she cries when she imagines Yuto empathizing with the boy. She wonders whether his reading, which preceded her revelation that the man he knew as his father was not Daisuké Taniguchi, might have reflected an intuition she had not recognized. The novel leaves that question open. What Rié can know is that the story gives her a way to consider Yuto’s loneliness and pain, which he does not ordinarily discuss. A book becomes a meeting place precisely because mother and son do not share the same interior understanding.

Her closeness to him grows through that difference rather than through mastery of the text. Yuto had told her about the uncanny exchange between the boy and the tiger lily, but not that the story concerned separation from a father. Rié hears the urgency of the line about death arriving at an unknown time and understands that her son had been trying, obliquely, to share an emotional connection. Though she sees him every day, she finds herself drawing nearer through a book. She changes how she treats him as well: she stops speaking condescendingly, tries to explain her own feelings when upset, and resolves to respect the parts of him that remain beyond her ken.

The Cicada Shell and the Unnamed Dead

Yuto’s poem gives Rié another indirect account of his inner life. Its image begins at Burial Mound Park, where an abandoned cicada shell clings to a cherry tree while cicadas sing in the upper branches. Yuto imagines the shell hearing the voice of the body that had lived inside it underground for seven years. A crack along its back reminds him of a violin’s soundboard; the shell becomes, in his imagination, a resonating instrument. The poem’s chain of association makes absence audible: the discarded form remains while the living voice has moved elsewhere.

Rié knows that Yuto’s account does not mention his brother’s or father’s death. Still, she recognizes the tree as the one her husband had chosen for himself, and pictures Yuto alone beneath it, listening and looking at the shell. She cannot tell whether the scene in his explanation is an actual memory or an invention. That uncertainty does not cancel what she learns: literature has given her son a way to cope with ordeals that she could neither recommend nor have devised for him. The poem is less a transparent confession than a form through which she can approach what he has not said.

The idea extends to Rié’s own effort to recover a relationship with the dead man she had known under another name. After Kido reports that her husband’s real name was Makoto Hara, Rié feels as though she is meeting him again, but naming him does not by itself reconcile her with the person in her memories. She cannot comfortably call him Daisuké, which now feels like someone else’s possession, and she cannot immediately settle on Makoto either, since he is no longer there to answer. Only after Kido leaves and she can look again at the photographs on her computer does she feel sure he had hoped she would love him as Makoto, not just as Daisuké. As with Yuto’s poem, a name and a story bring the absent person closer without restoring his presence.

Connection Without Equivalence

Across Kido, Hara, and Rié, another life functions as a mirror, a medium, and sometimes a borrowed identity. Kido investigates Hara to reach questions about his own existence; he then uses the Narcissus myth to think through Hara’s wish to leave himself. Rié uses Yuto’s reading and writing to approach feelings her son has not directly disclosed, and uses photographs and the recovered name Makoto to reconsider the husband she mourns. These acts of interpretation are intimate, but they remain interpretations: Kido admits that his theory of Hara may reflect his own fascination, and Rié cannot be certain whether Yuto’s imagined scene at the tree happened as he described it.

The novel therefore presents identification as a way of making contact, not a guarantee of complete understanding. A reader may enter another person’s trauma; a mother may feel the force of a story she cannot fully explain; a widow may hear the wishes of a husband who can no longer reply. In each case, the other person’s life opens a path toward the self, while its difference remains. That tension gives the concept its emotional and ethical force: another’s story can make suffering thinkable, but it cannot be substituted for the person who suffered or for the relationship that has been lost.